Biographies > Gordon MacKenzie
Gordon MacKenzie is internationally known as a watercolorist. He is also a well known art educator and author of The Watercolorists’ Essential Notebook and The Watercolorists’ Essential Notebook – Landscapes. He is a keen outdoors enthusiast. Painting for him is simply an extension of his primary interest in the natural world. Initially he worked in oils and variety of other media. However, he switched to watercolours as he felt it better captured the essence of nature. This painting of birch trees, in the TAG collection, is representative of his work – an apparently simple composition full of complex use of light, layout and form.
Gordon was born in the Northern Ontario community of New Liskeard where he received his early education. He now lives in Sault Ste Marie. He went to Teacher’s college and took art courses at the Ontario College of Art where he received his first formal art training. As well as an exhibiting professional artist, Gordon was a teacher and art consultant for the Sault Ste Marie Board of Education for thirty-three years. He has also taught university level art education to teachers and for over twenty years he has taught art privately.
Gordon has had twenty-five solo watercolour shows in Canada and the U.S. and his work hangs in many private and corporate collections throughout Canada, the U.S., Europe, Africa and the Far East. He has received many honours including that of the Detroit Institute of Art and the American Artist annual competition. He has been a successful participant in the last nineteen Buckhorn Art Festivals and his work has made the cover of Readers Digest in Canada, Switzerland, Finland, Australia and the U.S.
The artist says, “It is not necessarily the grandiose which impresses me. I’m more interested in relationships in nature which mirror our own existence and in the simple beauty of the little things we so often overlook. If I can heighten the viewer’s awareness of his world and make them wonder about their place in it, or even make them search for their own beauty, then I feel that I have achieved a great deal. If I can have the viewer experience the spirit of movement which I experienced, then I think I’ve touched a soul.”1
